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Why does MyAnimeList need 938 partners?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Privacy
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That's the neat part, you can't, because the companies that run ad networks (e.g. Google and Meta) intentionally make the consumer behaviours market as opaque as possible. As the market maker, they have an economic incentive to withold information from their customers, because any mistakes from market participants due to information assymetries directly translate to profit surplus for the market maker.
We have long since moved on from simple pay per click/view pricing models to pay per "impression," the definition of which is not clear even to the companies that purchase the ads.
And in a somewhat ironic twist, one of the motivations for such extensive surveillance is the desire to quantify such ROIs. Statistics and analytics such as click through and conversion rates all require tracking user behaviour across vast networks.
I wish I could find the ad impression bot fraud article I think I saw on Lemmy recently, but alas. It’s a scammy house of cards.
I guess what I'm thinking is this scenario: if a person never had a gmail account or used any google products ever, google still makes bank off that person by using third-party cookies & scripts, cross-site tracking, fingerprinting, Ad ID / Device ID sync, et al. How can you not call that data theft when you don't use their products?
Now I'm sure somewhere in the google products TOS, it states you will bend over and spread your cheeks, but for the person that doesn't use said company's products, this seems a bit different.